Films are a way to communicate the human experience, sometimes uniquely representing the current mood of a populace or political movement of the time. This research explores how the film The Messenger, released during the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, portrayed the religious and spiritual elements of American society and the experience of the soldier during wartime. It did this by employing a study of dialogue, signs, and symbols popularized by scholar Robert Bellah and his theory of the American Civil Religion. This article explores how both overt and embedded messages of religion and spirituality are intrinsically tied with the American military experience.

The emergence of the early Quaker movement in England has been well documented. This paper focuses on Quakers’ confrontation with the establishment and with both Christian mainstream writers and other dissenting Christians. My discourse-analytic case study makes use of corpus-based techniques to uncover how Quakers and their adversaries spoke and wrote about themselves in relation to the other. I draw on theoretical studies within the field of pragmatics to show how these two groups unconsciously used markers of clusivity and stance. Results indicate a strong sense of Quaker separateness within seventeenth-century society, with implications for religious minorities today.

Religious faith is rooted in the teachings of sacred, and often ancient, texts. These texts are taught from, talked about, and integrated into the core of religious organizing and personal meaning-searching for citizens around the world. In many cases, a larger religious entity dictates and utilizes the various sacred texts of a faith to communicate with and teach local members of that faith. This article examines the relationships between religious organizations, local members, and Christian church texts by combining the methodological concerns of Institutional Ethnography with Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony in order to understand how religious texts are invoked as sacred by organizational members in talk about their congregation, and how they are created and recreated through storytelling.

This article frames Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ as papal media ecology, religious communication that invites interpretations using media ecology. First, a media ecological analysis of Laudato Si’ articulates concerns about the global, environmental impact of the technocratic paradigm. Second, Martin Heidegger’s definition for ge-stell is examined to consider the effects of technology on existence. Third, Heidegger’s methods for rejecting ge-stell are compared to Pope Francis’ plans for replacing the technocratic paradigm. Pope Francis offers a superior approach because a combined top-down and bottom-up approach in a community committed to social change is more likely to enact a paradigm shift.

Guided by the common ingroup identity model (CIIM; Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000; Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman, & Rust, 1993), this study utilized a sample of undergraduate students (N = 175) who identified as Catholic or non-Catholic, and who were assigned randomly to one of the three homily conditions (i.e., “you” language, “we Christians” language, or “we everyone” language). Consistent with predictions, the results indicated that, compared to non-Catholics, Catholics had significantly more positive perceptions of the priest, as did individuals—Catholic and non-Catholic—who read the “we Christians” language homily as compared to those who read the “you” language homily.

The pilgrim’s view is a foundational lens on human communication that operates as an alternative to information centered models and symbolic constitutive views of communication. We draw together thinkers on pilgrimage in a discussion that foregrounds the significance of shared paths as embodied narratives in a movement towards justice and the good life. Such a vision for communication engages with and builds upon the work of the Rev. James W. Carey in his conceptualization of a ritual view of communication that explicitly addresses religious community. A concept of pilgrimage is emboldened in this essay by recourse to theologians, most notably William T. Cavanaugh.